Ultrasonic systems or devices of the diagnostic kind are known and are the result of advances in the underlying technology, which have permitted miniaturization of the necessary electronics. The ultrasound industry continues to reduce the size and weight of available diagnostic equipment. The smaller and lighter equipment has improved portability, however, existing portable ultrasound technology is not without its limitations.
One shortcoming of some portable systems is that the need to hold onto or otherwise manipulate the equipment with both hands during use hinders the ability of a person to productively use the system in some situations. For example, document U.S. Pat. No. 5,590,658 discloses an ultrasound system including a laptop computer with the capability of displaying ultrasound images obtained with a handheld scan head. With this kind of system, in order to ensure that the display is visible at all times during acquisition of the ultrasound signals with the scan head, the user must either hold the laptop computer, or change the position of the laptop computer to face the user, who may be moving around to position the scan head in a suitable location during the imaging session. As a result, the system user's hand that is not being used to manipulate the scan head is often nonetheless occupied and not always free to assist with the medical procedure.
The portable ultrasound systems, disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,722,412 and 5,738,099, are of the kind that is so-called “hand held” and integrate the display and the transducer in the same unit. While in essence permitting the scan head and the display to be held in one hand, these systems suffer from a different shortcoming. In particular, in order for the ultrasound user to get the desired view, it is frequently necessary to move the transducer repeatedly to different regions of the patient and to different orientations. In so doing, the displays of these systems may not be sufficiently visible to a user unless that user moves about, possibly into awkward positions.
A further kind of portable ultrasound systems is disclosed in document U.S. Pat. No. 6,126,608. This kind of devices includes a scan head and a main unit. Circuitry forms the image based on the ultrasound signals collected by the scan head. A display screen is carried by the main unit and displays the ultrasound image. The main unit is relatively small and is provided in combination with an attachment member, which is mountable around a forearm of the system user such that said display is visible to the system user during use. The attachment member extends toward a hand of the system user at the end of the forearm and includes a digit-accommodating opening.
Although this ultrasound system overcomes the shortcomings of the above mentioned known systems, by leaving a hand free to carry out help functions during imaging while permitting at the same time to have the display always optimally directed against the user, so that the said user can have the best view of the display, there are still shortcomings which consist principally in that:
The display is very small in size, and
The hand at the arm, to which the main unit is attached, cannot carry out any tasks or functions connected to the device such as controlling the device by means of control buttons or the like. These tasks must be carried out by the hand carrying the probe so that in certain situations the scanning process must be interrupted or even aborted due to the fact that some controls has to be activated on the main unit.
A general drawback of the increasing miniaturisation trend of the ultrasound systems consists in that said portable systems are limited of certain specific applications of the ultrasound imaging technique and that, in order to have systems able to carry put different kinds of applications of the ultrasound imaging technique, bigger and less portable devices are still needed.
Thus, it would be desirable to provide a portable ultrasound system which overcomes these and other shortcomings of the prior art that were discussed above.